In the spirit of rocket stage reusability, I'm bumping this thread. SpaceX was a fledgling startup in 2010. Well, 8 years old but for rockets, that's an infant. Here, just 8 years after that, we get ...

Like Russia and the US-based United Launch Alliance, the Ariane Group faces pricing pressure from SpaceX, which offers launch prices as low as $62 million for its Falcon 9 rocket. It has specifically developed the Ariane 6 rocket to compete with the Falcon 9 booster.

But there are a couple of problems with this. Despite efforts to cut costs, the two variants of the Ariane 6 will still cost at least 25 percent more than SpaceX's present-day prices. Moreover, the Ariane 6 will not fly until 2020 at the earliest, by which time Falcon 9 could offer significantly cheaper prices on used Falcon 9 boosters if it needed to. (The Ariane 6 rocket is entirely expendable).

He's bitching because they can't compete with SpaceX rates in the European market. Why? Because SpaceX doesn't have to build every rocket from scratch. They build it once and reused it up to ten times. It's very unfair because they can't do the same thing; making rockets reusable is too efficient.

"Let us say we had ten guaranteed launches per year in Europe and we had a rocket which we can use ten times—we would build exactly one rocket per year," he said. "That makes no sense. I cannot tell my teams: 'Goodbye, see you next year!'"